Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (11 page)

Some of Chavez’s lieutenants, respecting his personal
ambivalence, omit telling him about tactics that he could
only permit at the risk of insincerity in his public statements.
But of course he knows that the incidents don’t
happen by themselves, and so, in his own conscience, he
must walk a narrow line. Apparently he walks it without
qualms. It is useless to speculate whether Chavez is a gentle
mystic or a tough labor leader single-minded to the point
of ruthlessness; he is both.

We neared the town. From the outlying fields on the
west end, Delano has little character: the one-story workers’
houses are often painted green, and the few trees are
low, so that the town seems a mere hardening, a gall,
in the soft sea of dusty foliage. The dominant structures in
Delano are the billboards, which are mounted high above
the buildings, like huge lifeless kites.

A farm truck came by, and the face of a blond boy
stared back at us. I wondered if the occupants had recognized
Chavez. “Some of the growers still get pretty nasty,”
Chavez remarked after a moment, “but the worst are some
of these young Anglo kids. They come by and give you the
finger, and you wave back at them. You don’t wave back
to make fun of them, you just wave back.”

As he spoke Chavez stopped to pat a mangy dog, which
flinched away from him; he retraced his steps a little ways
to squat and talk to it. He liked dogs very much, he said,
but had never owned one; he petted the dog for a long time.

“
‘Hay más tiempo que vida’
—that’s one of our
dichos
.
‘There is more time than life.’ We don’t worry about time,
because time and history are on our side.”

Children and a woman called to him from the shady yard
near the corner, and he called back, “Hi!
¡Poquito!
Hello!
¿Cómo está?
” Still walking, he asked the woman whether
her husband was still working
en la uva
(“in the grape”).
Cheerily she said yes. The woman’s house was adjacent to
the old Union office, now the hiring hall at the corner of
Asti Street which supplies workers to Union ranches in the
Delano area. The present Union offices, in the Pink
Building, are next door. This is the southwest corner of Delano,
and across the street, to the south and west, small patches of
vineyard stretch away. The hiring hall, originally a grocery,
is in poor repair due to old age and cheap construction, as
well as several hit-and-run assaults by local residents. “One
truck backed right into it,” Chavez said, bending to show
me the large crack in the wall. “Practically knocked down
the whole thing. See?” He straightened. “They broke all
these windows. One time they threw a soaked gasoline rag
through the window—that just about did it. But someone
saw them throw the fire rag and called the fire department,
and they put it on the radio, and my brother Richard was
listening and took off and got over here quick; he had it out
before the fire department got here.” Chavez shook his
head. “One second more and the whole thing would have
gone.” He laughed suddenly. “Man, they used to come here
and shoot
fire
arrows into the roof with bows and arrows!
We had to keep a ladder and a hose on hand for a long
time.”

In the late afternoon, outside the motel where I was staying,
I ran into the blond boy I had seen that morning staring
at Chavez from the pickup truck. He turned out to be a
nephew of a local grower, and was working in the vineyards
for the summer before going to college. He had stared at
Chavez because one of the foremen in the truck had said
that those Mexicans on Albany Street were probably some
of Chavez’s men, and now he was surprised to learn that he
had actually seen Chavez himself: as I had already discovered,
most of the growers had never laid eyes on this
dangerous figure and probably would not recognize him if
they did.

The nephew was handsome, pleasant and polite; he
called me “sir.” He said that although his generation felt less
violently than their fathers, and that some sort of farm
workers union seemed inevitable, the Delano growers
would let their grapes rot in the fields before signing a union
contract with Chavez. I asked if this was because Chavez
was a Mexican. No, he said, it was because Chavez was out
for himself and had no real support; even that three-day
fast last winter had been nothing but a publicity stunt.
When I questioned this, he did not defend his views but
merely shrugged; like a seedless California fruit, bred for
appearances, this boy lacked flavor.

He asked, “Do you like California?” Rightly bored by his
own question, he gazed at the glaring blue-and-orange
panels of the motel façade. “I think Delano is supposed to
be the flower capital of the world,” he said.

At dark I went to the Guadalajara restaurant, overlooking
U.S. 99, where I had good beer and tortillas, and listened to
such jukebox songs as “Penas a la corazón” and “Tributo a
Roberto F. Kennedy.” Seeking directions to this place,
which is a farm workers restaurant, I earned the suspicion
of the motel manager. “Guadalajara? That’s a Mexican
restaurant, ain’t it?” In this small town of 12,000, he did
not know where it was. Standing there behind his fake-plywood
Formica desk, in the hard light and hum of air conditioning,
he stared after me. “Good luck,” he said in a
sniping voice as I went through the glass door, which swung
to on the conditioned air with a soft exhaling.

In the San Joaquin Valley summer night, far out beyond
the neon lights, crickets jittered and a dog barked in the
wash of silence between passing cars. Alone in his office,
the manager still stood there, hands on his barren desk,
with as much vindictiveness in his face as a man can afford
who believes that the customer is always right. Under the
motel sign, the light read V
ACANCY
.

I
  HAD arrived in Delano late in the evening of the
last night of July, and was to meet Cesar Chavez for the first
time the following morning in the office of his assistant,
Leroy Chatfield. The whole staff had just returned from a
retreat at St. Anthony’s Mission, in the Diablo Range, “a
holy place,” Mr. Chatfield said, “where we tried to figure
out how to make life miserable for rich people.”

Chatfield is a gaunt, mild-mannered man with the white
hair of a summer child and the wide-eyed, bony face of a
playful martyr; at thirty-four, he is one of the brightest and
most resourceful of a bright and resourceful staff. Before
coming to Delano three years before, he had been Brother
Gilbert of Christian Brothers and a teacher at Garces High
School, in Bakersfield; but it was Cesar Chavez, he said,
who gave him his education. As Chatfield spoke of Chavez
and the farm workers, his face was radiant; Mrs. Israel,
struck by this, said, “You really love these people, don’t you,
Leroy?” It was a straight question, not a sentimental one,
and it made him blink, but he did not back away from it.
“Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “I mean, you don’t
meet
people
like that  .  .  .” His voice trailed off and he shrugged, at a loss,
still smiling.

While Chavez was meeting with some visitors from
Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
Mrs. Israel and I were taken on a tour of the Union
offices, which are small and cluttered and busy. Chatfield
introduced us to Union vice-president Dolores Huerta, to
Chavez’s administrative assistant, the Reverend James
Drake, to staff lawyers Jerome Cohen and David Averbuck,
to Philip Vera Cruz, a Union officer and head of the Filipino
membership in the absence of assistant director Larry
Itliong, and to Helen Chavez, who is in charge of the credit
union office. Mrs. Chavez, Chatfield told us, is very quiet
and very strong, with a hot temper that rarely surfaces.
“Sometimes,” he said, “she has less faith than Cesar in nonviolence.”
Chatfield’s disarming innocence and his gift for
understatement have made him very effective as a Union
negotiator, and since he is also a good speaker, he often
represents the Union when Chavez himself cannot make a
public appearance.

Most of the offices are decorated with posters of Union
heroes. Robert and John Kennedy are everywhere, and
some of their portraits are black-bordered and hung with
flowers, as in a shrine. A huge blue-bordered picture of
Gandhi contrasts strangely with blood-red posters of Emiliano
Zapata, complete with mustachio, cartridge belts, carbine,
sash, sword and giant sombrero, under the legend
VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN
. Here and there are Union emblems, a
square-edged black eagle in a white circle on a red background,
over the letters
UFWOC
or the word
HUELGA
, which
means “strike.” Chavez says that the impact of a black emblem
in a white circle on a red field was discovered by the
Egyptians. Some people like to think that the eagle appeared
to Cesar Chavez in a dream; some say it came to
Chavez’s cousin Manuel, whose inspiration was the label
on a wine jug of Gallo Thunderbird. The truth is that the
emblem Chavez wanted was an Aztec eagle, which he
asked Manuel to design. With the assistance of Richard,
Manuel sketched it on a piece of wrapping paper, and they
squared off the wing edges so that “the damn thing would
be easier to draw,” not only for Richard and Manuel, but for
the many strikers who have since sewn homemade flags for
use on the picket lines.

Manuel and Richard Chavez were on the point of setting
off for New York by car to help with the faltering boycott;
Manuel was waiting in Chatfield’s office when we returned.
He is a powerful, volatile man with a high forehead whose
supreme confidence in his own ability to reverse the New
York tide was not meant entirely in fun. “I’m going over to
New York,” he said. “How far is it? I’ll be back in three
weeks.”

The Union boycott of California table grapes, which
began in New York City in January 1968, has since been
extended to other cities; if it can be sustained, it will be the
first successful nationwide boycott in the history of the
American labor movement. At first the boycott, led by
young strikers who sought and got the support of local
militants of the New Left, was unquestionably effective; in
New York, for example, there were no grapes to be found
in June and early July. B
OYCOTT
J
EOPARDIZES
E
NTIRE
G
RAPE
C
ROP
read the
California Farmer
’s headline of July 6. “No
question that the boycott of California grapes,” wrote the
Sunkist
Newsletter
for August, “unethical and illegal as it
may be, is currently effective.” The anti-Union press spoke
somberly of the boycott, which, if successful, could be applied
to any product; consumers were exhorted in patriotic
language to fight for their food freedoms to the last man.
But toward the end of July, boxes of green Thompson seedless
grapes labeled
HI-COLOR
began to flood the New York
market. The
HI-COLOR
label belongs to the Earl Packing
Company, a subsidiary of the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation,
with which UFWOC has a contract, and which is therefore
specifically exempt from the boycott. But Di Giorgio was
not harvesting table grapes in 1968, which meant that its
label was being used illegally by the non-Union growers.
Manuel Chavez had just heard that a worker had seen
HI-COLOR
labels in the vineyards of Bruno Dispoto; Sabovich
and Kovacevich, in the fields around Arvin and Lamont,
southeast of Bakersfield, were also suspect. But the
true culprit was evidently the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation
itself, which had permitted the use of the exempted label in
an effort to subvert the boycott.

Or so it seemed to Cesar Chavez, who appeared suddenly
in Chatfield’s doorway. “I just had a talk with Robert Di
Giorgio in San Francisco,” he said to Chatfield. “I told him
this was irresponsible and dishonest. I told him, ‘You want a
fight, you’re going to have one!’” Hearing himself talk this
way, his intense expression gave way to a gleeful smile and
he rubbed his hands. At the same instant he caught sight of
Mrs. Israel and came forward to embrace her. Warmly,
within seconds, he welcomed us both to Delano, said good-bye
to Manuel, apologized for being so busy and excused
himself. “I see you later, hey?” A moment later his head
reappeared in the doorway. “There’s a very ancient saying,”
he said somberly, raising one finger. “‘Never trust a
grower!’” The same gleeful smile lit up his face again as it
disappeared.

•   •   •

In the days that followed, I was able to piece together
the story of how Chavez became an organizer. Chavez, who
described most of it himself, picketed the cotton fields at
Corcoran for the National Agricultural Workers Union in
1946, when he was nineteen, and watched the union fail.
Subsequently he would mutter about the frustrations of the
poor to his wife, Helen, and his brother Richard, but he saw
no way to put his outrage into action until 1952. That year
he and Richard lived across the street from each other in
San Jose, and worked together in the apricot groves. The
Los Angeles headquarters of Saul Alinsky’s Community
Service Organization wanted to set up a chapter there, and
among the names given to the CSO organizer by the parish
priest, Father Donald McDonnell, was that of Cesar
Chavez.

“I came home from work and this gringo wanted to see
me. In those days when a gringo wanted to see you, it was
something special; we never heard anything from whites
unless it was the police. So anyway, Helen says, ‘Oh no, it
must be something good for Mexicans—money and a better
job and things!’” Chavez’s expression conveyed what he
had thought about promises of something good for Mexicans.
“You see, Stanford University had people nosing
around, writing all kinds of screwy reports about how
Mexicans eat and sleep, you know, and a lot of dirty kind of
stuff, and Berkeley had its guys down there, and San Jose
State—all the private colleges; they were interested in the
worst
barrio
, the toughest slum, and they all picked Sal Si
Puedes.”